Google AdSense has just released a new feature for publishers to take advantage of. You can now have ROUNDED corners on your Google ads. It’s about time. I’ve had rounded corners on many of my websites for years. It seems like Google would have been a bit quicker in getting this to the assembly line but hey, at least it’s here now.

How do you use these new rounded corners? Easy. When creating your ad blocks, there is a new option called “Corner Styles”. Simply select your desired corner type from the corresponding dropdown menu:

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I received this an email from Yahoo a few hours ago announcing a new “quality” based pricing that they will be introducing as of today. Here’s how quality pricing works according to the email:

“Quality-based pricing will give us the ability to price traffic commensurate with the value that advertisers receive from each traffic source. We recognize that this approach may have an impact on how you operate your business, and as a valued Yahoo! publisher we wanted to let you know about this new feature, as you may notice fluctuations in your Yahoo! Publisher Network earnings.”

I am already not a fan of this. I’ve been on both sides of marketing for a long time now and from my experience it has always been the advertisers responsibility to spend their advertising dollars wisely. With this new system Yahoo will basically be guaranteeing advertisers their money’s worth while publishers are tossed around in the wind. I could have a highly professional site that I put a lot of time and money into and be using Yahoo instead of direct advertising. Well, even if my site is totally legit and NOT MFA (or in this case MFY), if the advertiser doesn’t convert on their choice of advertising keywords that put their ad on my site in the first place then they will get their money back and I will be left with nothing. Yahoo sees this differently, however:

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A lot of people swear by AdSense. They make big checks and are definitely success stories on their own, but, is AdSense the end all for online advertising? Lately I’ve started to think that maybe AdSense is the lazy approach to making money online. Now I use AdSense and definitely am a believer in it, but, consider this. If somebody is willing to pay you say $1.00 per click are you the one making the best money or are they? Obviously they would not continue to pay a set amount per click unless they were successfully converting those clicks.

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Every AdSense publisher has at one point or another been faced with the decision to make their ads stand out or blend into their website. I have always been a fan of blending my ads because it tends to look better, but lately I’ve been trying some other options and I have to say that I am starting to lean towards making my ads stand out more.

I think it’s a tricky thing to get your ads just right, but you’ll never find out if you never change them around and try new things. I have lately tried using some pastel type colors that don’t really look ugly, but also don’t blend in directly to my site.

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I have had a YPN account since Yahoo first started their PPC service. At first I joined in with the crowd and was excited to be a part of the YPN beta launch. At first it seemed everybody was making a lot more money with YPN than with Adsense and everybody who was anybody seemed to be supporting the jump to YPN. Well it’s now been a few years and I have to say that I’ve gone back to Google for PPC publishing.

Yahoo promised all sorts of targeting and higher percentage payouts than Google. This all sounds nice when you hear it but even now Yahoo has not managed to perfect their targeting system. Based on some experimenting I did with Google and Yahoo on the same site (on alternating page loads) it turned out that Yahoo DOES in fact generate more money per click, but, the problem is that Adsense gets more clicks.

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